Apple Vs Google

My New Year's resolution for TiPb is to be nicer to Google in 2011. Last year was an amazing year for the world's largest, most powerful internet company. Thanks to relentless software improvement, Verizon's Droid marketing, and top-of-the-line hardware like the Galaxy S, Google's Android OS became the fastest accelerating platform in the mobile space. They also unleashed improvements to Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube, and so many other already excellent services at a speed and quality level that, frankly, no other company could have matched.

iPhone has decimated Verizon's growth, Google is uncertain ally, and Android is simply not competitive with iPhone to the degree Verizon may have had to give in to Apple's demands in order to launch a Verizon iPhone is 2011. That according to Horace Dediu of asymco who breaks down the numbers Matthew Goodman, a research analyst at ITG Investment, claims may represent Verizon's monthly sales figures by device.

If the data is accurate (big if), Dediu says RIM's BlackBerry and Palm's webOS fell considerably and Android manufacturers hit a wall in August following the wide spread availability of iPhone 4.

I bought a Nexus One when it was made available with AT&T/Rogers-friendly 3G bands and was fairly certain I would be getting a Nexus 2 when it came out. But it didn't. The Nexus S came out instead and while I joked the S was 2 written backwards I now believe they deliberately didn't use the 2 and I think I know why.

Why did Steve Jobs show up on an Apple financial results call, something he's done in the past but doesn't typically do, and more importantly why did go all Samuel L. Jackson on RIM's BlackBerry and Google's Android, something not typically done on any results call? After all, there's an Apple event coming up on Wednesday where no doubt Jobs will be center stage, in front of almost the entire blogsphere and half the internet at large. Why not wait for then?

Because this was about mobile and about iOS, and about iOS' place in mobile, and Wednesday is purely Back to the Mac. The next iOS-centric event likely won't be until January 2011 for iPad 2 and by then the all-important holiday quarter will be over, RIM's BlackBerry Playbook will be closer to launch, a million more Android devices will be on the market, and Microsoft and Palm might be getting back into the game.

Right now, today, Apple posted unbelievable numbers -- 14.1 million iPhones sold and 4.1 million iPads -- they beat RIM's BlackBerry numbers this quarter and given the way Jobs was strutting, they likely beat the numbers of every Android device sold as well. This was Jobs on top of the mountain, seizing the high ground, and striking.

Steve Jobs' surprise appearance on Apple's Q4 conference call, and his utter annihilation of the 7-inch tablet concept, means Apple will never, not ever release a 7-inch tablet... or is planning to release one very, very soon.

Making a surprise appearance during Apple's Q4 2010 conference call today, Steve Jobs tore into Google on the issue of openness. Jobs basically said Google uses openness as a smokescreen for fragmented, while Apple prefers an integrated software/hardware business model.

Apple makes devices that just work, Jobs said, while Google expects the customers to be systems integrators and figure out multiple different hardware and now even app stores as Verizon, Amazon, and Vodafone start rolling their own markets. For developers, considering everything from testing to selling, it becomes a mess.

Apple just launched the second edition of Apple TV, Microsoft has Media Center, and now it's Google's turn with Google TV. Logitech launches their vision soon, as does Sony, so once again it's Apple's integrated model against Google's de-coupled software, and only consumer choice can win.